We've seen a lot of reports going back and forth about whether or not Linux is doing well in the netbook space. As it turns out, research firm ABI Research as well as Dell say about one third of their machines ship with Linux pre-installed - which is pretty darn impressive.

Quite seriously, I prefer a combination of Linux with a Solid State Drive, rather than XP with a normal laptop hard drive. I upgraded my original eee 701 to Ubuntu 9.10 and with no RAM upgrade (still the original 512Mb) and just a 4Gb SSD, 9.10 is still fast and responsive. Try emulating *that* with XP or Windows 7.

Generally speaking, XP on netbooks with an Atom CPU, 1Gb of RAM and an ordinary drive is pretty slow, whereas Linux on the same machine is faster and much more responsive.

Now I'm not a Linux fanboy per se. I use Windows on my desktop PCs, for the applications and games. However, as my netbook is only used for simple tasks I really don't see the point in paying for Windows+Office+antivirus when Linux+OpenOffice works well enough that you can get by. All I want to do is browse the web over 3G, edit a few Word and Excel documents, and maybe play the occasional movie file.

I've seen Windows 7 on a netbook and it is better than XP speed-wise. However, the Starter edition doesn't do much for me, and the cost of upgrading to Professional is excessive considering the total cost of the original package (A$500 or so).

I have a Netbook, and it came to me without an OS. So I decided for kicks to put on Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Quite impressive actually.

What has me impressed:

1) Suspend works! Windows 7 to this day cannot get it right. I close the lid, system goes on standby, I open the lid system starts up again. I want this to work in a couple of seconds not MINUTES...

2) Battery power. Linux just uses the CPU much more efficiently. It was told me that the netbook could get max about an hour. I regularly get three to four. And when I wanted to install Windows 7 I heard the fan for the first time.

Not to say that I don't like Windows 7. I use it on my desktop all the time and an quite happy. But for a netbook Microsoft f***d up, and remains f****d up.